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The Wagner mercenary group chief has reportedly died in a plane crash, said Russian civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia, adding that Yevgeny Prigozhin was on the list of passengers on the plane that crashed on a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
A plane carrying three crew members and seven passengers that was en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg went down almost 300 kilometers (185 miles) north of the capital. A BBC report cites the executive jet showed no signs of trouble until a sudden drop in its final 30 seconds of received altitude.
Ian Petchenik, who works for flight tracker Flightradar24, told the Reuters news agency that the Embraer Legacy 600 jet made a “sudden downward vertical" at 15:19 GMT. Then within about 30 seconds, the aircraft plummeted more than 8,000 feet from its cruising altitude of 28,000 feet.
The suspicious plane crash and Yevgeny Prigozhin's death came two months after the Wagner group took out a rebellion march toward Moscow to overthrow Vladimir Putin's military leadership. However, Prigozhin and Putin had a deal that ensured that all the charges against the Wagner founder and his fighters were dropped when the mutiny ended.
A day before the Wagner chief's reported death in the plane crash, a Russian official visited Libya to reassure allies that fighters from the Wagner Group would remain in the country, but under Moscow's control, according to Reuters reports.
Speaking to eastern Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar on Tuesday, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov said that the Wagner forces would report to a new commander.
"Yevkurov's visit suggests that if anything - the Russian footprint in Libya might deepen and expand rather than shrink," said Libya researcher Jalel Harchaoui of the Royal United Services Institute as quoted by Reuters.
The military meeting was a sign that Moscow did not mean to relinquish the global network the mercenary group built up. Now with Prigozhin believed dead, the fate of the complex, lucrative web of military and commercial operations he and Wagner created for Russia across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa hangs in the balance.
Wagner has waged major battles in Ukraine, fought in civil wars and insurgencies in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, and Mali, and taken control of gold mines and oil fields along the way.
Putin had already rolled up Wagner operations in Syria. After the mutiny, Wagner's Ukraine forces handed over a base to Russia's regular military and began relocating to an army camp in Belarus, though it is unclear how many of them are there.
After the June mutiny, Prigozhin intensified his efforts to bolster Wagner's presence in Africa. In countries where Wagner operates through an official agreement with Moscow, analysts do not expect much to change - for now.
The fate of Wagner's purely economic - rather than security assets - may be even harder to determine. There has been no information on the fate of Evro Polis, a company Wagner is said to own with oil assets in Syria.
(With Reuters inputs)
